Almond cream

Almonds, water, coconut oil, blender. Almond cream get the money.

I'm a food aversion hipster. I was allergic to dairy before it was cool. No, seriously, I've been allergic to dairy my whole life. I'm not lactose intolerant like most of the world, I'm allergic. It's like the peanut allergy, but less severe (I won't explode if I'm in the same room as a stick of butter).

Until recently, this has been a huge annoyance. Every time I sat down to eat with someone I would have to explain my bizarre allergy. 

"WHAT!?!?!? You can't drink milk!?! How do you eat cereal? You can't eat ice cream!?! I couldn't live without ice cream!!!!"

Not to mention the fact that Americans cover everything they eat in cheese. It's still annoying today, but there are a lot more options and better food labeling, I've also built up a bit of a tolerance.

The conversation at the table is a little different too. "Oh you don't eat dairy? Well, I'm gluten-free vegan. Is this organic?"

I still can't eat things like heavy cream though, and neither can most people in the world. So what's a good substitute when you need to make something like a Brandy Alexander or a Grasshopper?

There are plenty of milk substitutes: Rice milk, almond milk, coconut milk, hemp milk, etc, but none of them have the consistency of heavy cream. No problem, just add coconut oil!

A tablespoon of coconut oil makes two cups of milk-substitute nice and thick and creamy! I decided to make my own almond milk to try it out. This seriously couldn't be easier: Soak almonds in water over night, then put them in a blender with water and coconut oil. Strain out the blended liquid and you're finished!

The improved Cable Car cocktail

The Chinese five spiced Brugal Añejo turned out wonderful! It's a complex and mysterious spice flavor that fits perfectly into my improved version of the Cable Car cocktail.

Again, the traditional Cable Car from the Starlight Room in the 90's was Captain Morgan spiced rum, orange curaçao and sour mix in a martini glass with a cinnamon-sugared rim. Captain Morgan is terrible rum and don't get me started on sour mix. Orange curaçao can be good if you choose a quality brand and use it correctly, but I think it is too sweet for this drink.

For my improved version, I wanted to pay homage to the original and also pay homage to San Francisco. So my recipe is: Chinese five-spiced Brugal Añejo rum, Cointreau, cinnamon syrup, lemon juice, egg white and a couple dashes of orange bitters.

I call it: The California & Grant.

I substituted the five-spiced Brugal for the Captain Morgan to give the drink a little taste of China Town. I think Cointreau is better than orange curaçao in this case because it is not as sweet. The cinnamon syrup gives the drink the sweetness it needs plus the additional warm spiciness of cinnamon.  Lemon juice balances it all out and the egg white makes it foamy. Orange bitters on top give the foam a nice aroma.

The new version is based on a sour, while the original is based on a Sidecar. I first served it in a martini glass, but I think a chilled, fancy rocks glass would be more appropriate.

Delicious!

Why make your own chocolate liqueur?

Mostly because it's fun and satisfying, but partly because there doesn't seem to be very many good products on the market. There doesn't seem to be any organic products either. I mean, Godiva is excellent, but it's expensive and there are other good chocolate liqueurs out there, but they're hard to find. And, of course, the cheap stuff is terrible.

So I decided to make my own 100 percent organic crème de cacao as part of my quest for the perfect grasshopper. It's been quite an enjoyable process so far. I've learned a lot about new ingredients like cacao nibs. I also learned how to split a vanilla bean, as I'm simultaneously making vanilla extract to use in the same recipe.

The process is basically like making a liquid chocolate bar. What do you need to make dark chocolate? Cacao, sugar, some other flavors like vanilla and a way to cook it. In this case, the way to cook it is infusing it in vodka.

It takes nine or ten days to infuse, so we'll have to be patient, but I'm excited to try it out when it's finished.

Cheers!

Mint liqueur bottled!

Mix it with cognac to make a Stinger. Classic old man drink.

It's finished! And it tastes wonderful! It is nothing like Crème de menthe. It tastes fresh, mild and sweet. It doesn't have the bright green color of the commercial stuff, but I think a neon green liquid looks a lot worse than a natural greenish brown. I don't know about you, but I don't want my drinks to look like household cleaners. (note: you can make your own household cleaner without dye too)

I think I will use a little bit less sugar next time, but for my first attempt at making a liqueur, I couldn't be more satisfied. Now, onto cacao infusion.

Vanilla extract

This will be vanilla extract. All you need to make vanilla extract is: a vanilla bean, vodka, a jar and some time. I will need it for my cacao liqueur, so I figured, why not make the vanilla extract myself too?

It's organic vodka and an organic vanilla bean, so the price is about the same as buying organic vanilla extract, but it's more fun and satisfying. Also, if I can find a source of less expensive vanilla beans, it would be cheaper to do it this way.

 Cheers!

Chinese five-spiced rum

Sorry this is turning into a homemade liquor blog, but that's what I'm into right now and this is my website!

I don't consider mixology an art, the same way I don't consider cooking an art. The motivation behind it is different. These things are, however, most definitely outlets for expressing creativity, and they share that similarity with art.

Chinese characters for "Spice" 

About a moth ago, I worked an awful catering gig serving some awful pre-mixed drinks: The Granny's Cran-Apple Pie and The Cable Car. They were absolutely terrible, unbalanced, sugary pieces of crap, but like most bad drinks there seemed to be something more to them.

I fixed the "Granny's Cran-Apple Pie" and served it at my last cocktail party. I dropped the "Granny's" part of the name and blended vodka, Cointreau, fresh lemon juice, homemade cinnamon-infused simple syrup, cranberry juice and cranberry bitters over ice in a fancy highball, garnished with an apple peel spiral and three thin apple slices and topped it up with Samuel Smith's hard apple cider. Delicious! 

The Cable Car needs some work too. What I served at the gig was actually the correct recipe: Captain Morgan, orange curaçao and sour mix. Gross!!! I live in San Francisco and I'm proud of my city, I'm especially proud of the cocktail culture that has been growing here for the past couple of years. I can't let a drink that is named after one my city's most iconic features, a drink that was invented right here at The Starlight Room, remain a nasty piece of crap. I must fix this drink!

Basically, my idea is to keep the same basic ingredients(but use better quality ones of course) and base the drink off of a classic sour instead of a Sidecar. I've recently fell in love with the spicy egg white foam in a well made sour and want to create my own version.

First I need a good spiced rum, Captain Morgan is not going to cut it. I recently watched Jeffery Morgenthaler's video about his version of the Dark & Stormy that used house made Chinese five-spiced rum, and decided to give it a shot. I think Chinese five spice is a better way to represent San Francisco in a cable car themed drink, especially since the cable car lines run through China Town.

I chose Brugal Añejo rum as the base. Brugal rums are a little bit dryer than most other rums, so I think it will work well with the other sweet ingredients. It should be ready tomorrow. I can't wait to taste it!

Organic house-made mint liqueur

So I'm changing careers. Or starting a career? I'm not really sure if I ever had a career, but rather a bunch of lame jobs to pay the rent. 

Anyway, I'm going to be a bartender/mixologist. It's something I genuinely love to do, fits with my lifestyle and it will eventually make me far more money than I'm making now and enable me to do more art. You may or may not have noticed that I haven't done anything in almost a year.

So now, on to the fun part. I've been making vodka infusions for a long time. In fact I took a whole case of them to Burning Man the past two years. However, now that I've learned how to mix cocktails, I've discovered that while tasty, they're not always particularly useful. They're great mixed with soda and good for shots, but I'd rather drink bourbon if I'm going to drink straight alcohol.

I recently discovered that making liqueur is almost as easy as making an infusion, in fact it is the same thing but with the additional step of adding sugar. Yay! Let the new infusion adventures begin!

Crème de menthe is a liqueur, a notoriously disgusting one. This usually horrible concoction of neon green dye, corn syrup and low quality spirit base is used in some classic cocktails like the stinger, the grasshopper and... well, probably some others that got lost to history as the quality of the product went down the mass produced toilet.

But mint is yummy! Ginger is yummy too, and we have the amazing Domaine de Canton. Therefore mint should have a delicious liqueur as well. And a grasshopper, the creamy mint-chocolate dessert drink, should be a good thing right? Not an otherworldly-green colored glass full of diabetes-inducing goblin spunk.

So I decided to make my own mint liqueur with the best organic ingredients I could find. I'm going to make chocolate liqueur next, as well as almond cream, and hopefully I can resurrect  the prohibition-era grasshopper and make it delicious and fresh.

There are probably other ways to go about it. I mean how many ways can you add a flavor to a drink? Infused spirits, infused syrups, liqueurs, bitters, fresh ingredients, infused ice... I could take the idea of a mint-chocolate drink and go in a completely different direction, but the grasshopper seems like it should work the way it is. It seems pretty balanced. I think it's just bad because the ingredients are bad. So we'll see where this takes us, and hopefully I'll have a grasshopper based drink on my next cocktail menu.

Cheers!